Spencer Critchley: A solution to violence: For Our Future

Dec. 3, 2012 4:35 PM

Spencer Critchley / provided

Written by

SIG Spencer Critchley

Underline: Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (or if too long, CASP)

To get involved

CASP meets at 7 a.m. the first and third Wednesdays of each month at the Salinas City Elementary School District office at 840 S. Main St., Salinas.

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There are times when it’s easy to lose hope about youth, violence and the future we face — never more so than when another life has been lost to what seems to be utter madness.

Nineteen-year-old Devante Nicolas Arias was washing his car in front of a friend’s house last Friday afternoon. How could anything seem more normal for a teenager in America?

But then the madness: two men walked up to Devante and shot him in the head. He died at a trauma center shortly afterward.

If something like that can happen, not once, but multiple times in a year, then yes, it’s easy to lose hope.

But we don’t need to.

In fact, despite the horror of killings like this — and the even greater horror that they are not rare — now is the best time for hope that we have ever known.

That’s because, after decades of trying, we now know how to reverse the course of youth violence. The methods have been developed, they’ve been tested, and they work.

It’s now up to us — all of us — to just put them into practice.

That’s the mission of the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP) and its For Our Future / Para Nuestro Futuro campaign.

In the past, there have often been deep divides among people trying to reduce violence.

Some said that we just need to crack down: criminals won’t stop themselves from committing crimes; they need to know there will be consequences.

Others argued that violence doesn’t come from nowhere: criminals start life as innocent babies, the same as the rest of us. If we don’t address conditions that breed violence, like poverty, unstable families and poor education, we’ll never arrest our way to peace.

It has sometimes seemed as if the argument would go on forever, while violence just got worse. But in fact, thanks to a combination of innovation and careful evidence gathering, the argument is now essentially over.

That’s because we now know that violence, like so many of our toughest problems, does not have just a single cause, and so it does not have just a single solution.

Violence is a system, and it needs a systemic solution.

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Here’s a very simplified example of how the violence system operates:

1. By itself, poverty doesn’t cause violence (after all, most poor people are not violent), but poverty makes violence more likely.

2. Similarly, unstable families also make violence more likely.

3. If violence is allowed to grow, it produces more poverty and unstable families.

4. And that produces more violence, and so on.

In reality there are more factors than this, but you can already see that if you try to stop violence with a single solution, you will always fall short.

But here’s where there’s hope: A systemic problem can be tackled with a systemic solution.

And that’s what CASP’s For Our Future / Para Nuestro Futuro campaign is all about. It draws from the experience of cities that have already made dramatic progress against violence, including Boston, Los Angeles and, just up the road from us, San Jose.

San Jose used to be one of the most violent big cities in America. By using the right systemic solution, San Jose became one of the least violent big cities in America.

San Jose has a population more than 10 times the size of Salinas. In Salinas’ worst year for violence, 2009, 29 people were killed. In 2010, do you know how many people were killed in San Jose?

Six. That’s because San Jose got a head start on us in using the right systemic solution. But we’re catching up.

What does the systemic solution look like? Fundamentally, it has four elements: Prevention, Intervention, Suppression and Re-Entry. All four must work together — remember, it’s a system.

Prevention means that we address violence at its sources, going all the way back to the beginning of life. It turns out that the health of a pregnant mother correlates strongly to the likelihood that her child will grow up either to commit violence or suffer from it. Continuing through infancy and childhood, the kind of care children receive — including whether they witness physical or emotional violence in the home — also strongly correlates to violence later.

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Intervention means that we reach young people who are just starting to get into trouble and steer them away from the spiral of self-destruction. Examples here are counseling, educational assistance, or mentoring.

Suppression means that when people do choose to commit violence, we make sure we’re equipped to stop them. That requires a police force with the people, data, tools and techniques to get the job done.

Re-entry means that once offenders have served their time, we don’t just dump them back into the same situation they came from, where one of the likeliest outcomes is that they’ll go back to their old ways. Instead, we offer proven transition services that make re-offending much less likely.

In coming weeks and months, CASP members will share more with you about all of this and more, including the inspiring stories that are emerging from our For Our Future / Para Nuestro Futuro campaign

For now, the important thing to know is that the strategy works. And it will work here, if we — all of us — commit to it.

How can you help? Start by connecting with us: at one of our public meetings, on the web at future-futuro.org, on Facebook at facebook.com/future.futuro, and, of course, right here.